The Use of Information Resource Management (IRM) in Support of the Inspection and Evaluation Program for DOE/OSE

The Department of Energy, Office of Security Evaluations (DOE/OSE) is in the process of enhancing its inspection and evaluation programs in order to improve their effectiveness. The overall goal is to enhance the ability of OSE to make positive and gradual impacts on DOE's efforts to maintain and improve security at its nuclear facilities. This goal will be met by developing inspection and evaluation procedures that provide thorough, realistic, and unbiased judgments during inspections; produce reliable and rational inspection and evaluation results; are acceptable throughout DOE; and are defensible to criticism. These inspection and evaluation procedures will eventually result in inspections that will more realistically stress the safeguards and physical security at a site based on the accepted standards for that site. Underlying the approach for developing the inspection and evaluation procedures is an information system that will be used for the Information Resource Management (IRM) required to plan, conduct, and report inspections, and to perform evaluations. In addition, the information system will be used to archive inspection and evaluation inputs as \"lessons learned\" examples and to provide input to training inspectors. The primary benefits of the IRM include: 1) the ability to conduct inspections which are better focused on the most critical Research carried out under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy, Contract No. DE-AC01-86DP00113. topics; 2) increased efficiency in information processing and handling; 3) increased data availability in standard formats; 4) enhanced planning by providing more complete data; 5) increased inspection and evaluation scopes; and 6) improved data integrity.